CJR Audit Claims Google Shows Limited Number Of News Sources

The Columbia Journalism Review posted an audit that showed that just 20 news sources account for more than half of article impressions in the Top Stories section of Google. It said "The top 20 percent of sources (136 of 678) accounted for 86 percent of article impressions. And the top three accounted for 23 percent: CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. These statistics underscore the degree of concentration of attention to a relatively narrow slice of news sources." I should add, this study was from way back in in 2017 and only looked at one month of 2017.

Here was the breakdown:

Yea, no one should be surprised by this if they use see Top Stories in their search results daily.

The more interesting part to me is that this was posted on Reddit and one person posted about a far right news source named The Gateway Pundit not showing up, the Googler said it seems like a bug.

The complaint read "Fahrenheit 451 in real life. Instead of burning books they are suppressing links that don’t favor their political inclinations. Case in point, google ‘the gateway pundit’ https://www.google.com/search?q=the+gateway+pundit and search for the same In DuckDuckGo https://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+gateway+pundit find out where they show the actual website."

Ryan Moulton (@moultano) posted a response saying "Thanks for the report, that looks like a bug. I've passed it along."

Here is what the results look like now, notice that the web site does not rank number one for it's name but it does have the publisher knowledge graph on the right side!